I have now collected almost all the equipment I will need for my Echolocation sound installation, and am now trying to work out how to put it all together! In the meantime I have been working with recordings that I have previously made of the bats at different points along the River Cherwell, which runs alongside the Botanic Garden.

I am creating this piece using Symbolic Sound’s Kyma Sound Design Language, which allows me to create a series of virtual instruments that the bats will ‘play’ as they fly past and emit their ultrasonic calls. Although I am working with recordings of bats from the Botanic Garden that I made only a few weeks ago, it is still difficult to predict exactly how the piece will sound at the Magic Hour event. One of the reasons for this is that, at this stage, I have no idea as to what the bat activity will be like by the time we get to September, although I am imagining there will be more of them as I am assuming that their young will also be out foraging by then. Fortunately, my Kyma system is powerful enough for me to be able to keep the piece ‘live’, meaning that it should be easy enough to make adjustments to all the different parameters even on the performance nights themselves. That’s the plan, anyway….